Newton, Magus
While I have some sympathy with David Hambling’s complaint that nowadays there appears to be less weirdness in the world [FT438:14] I would have to disagree with his assertion that “The publication of… Newton’s
Principia Mathematica in 1687 was the starting point of the Scientific Revolution.” Many better qualified than me have suggested that Newton was more the last true Magus than the first scientist (as we would understand that word now). Newton’s primary interest was alchemy, on which he wrote more than a million words, conducting his own experiments which obviously held astrological components, as well as trying to establish a link between the precession of the equinoxes and the biblical account of the world – astrology again.
While all of this was going on his masterwork lay unpublished for some 20 years and came to be printed only at the insistence of the few who had read the manuscript. All of this is a matter of record, and while many might share Hambling’s belief in the
Principia’s impact very few have read its remarkable Introduction which completely refutes the idea that actual ‘forces’ are involved in celestial mechanics.
Newton writes: I likewise call attractions and impulses, in the same sense accelerative, and motive; and use the words attraction, impulse, or propensity of any sort towards a centre, promiscuously, and indifferently, one for another; considering those forces not physically but mathematically: wherefore the reader is not to imagine that by those words I anywhere take upon me to reason thereof, or that I attribute forces, in a true and physical sense, to certain centres (which are only mathematical points); when at any times I happen to speak of centres as attracting, or as endued with attractive powers. (Mathematical Principles, translated and edited by Florian Cajori, University of California Press, 1960, p.5).
This is a far cry from how physicists understand his work today, and Newton’s insistence that ‘mathematical points’ and not ‘forces’ dictate the nature of planetary movements is more in line with the astrological claim that the planets do not hold some conjectured physical influence, rather that their positions are indicative of the motion of events and their potential outcome. It would seem that some weirdness lurks even in the heart of the Principia.
Mike Harding
London